


crystalline

by thalassashells



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen, being hydaelyns chosen kind of sucks big time, ect ect, ysayle is in the scions cuz i think it rules
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-10-01 06:31:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10182977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thalassashells/pseuds/thalassashells
Summary: It can be hard to sleep with Her light in their eyes.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnonymousRequest](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=AnonymousRequest).



   Ysayle has not been with the Scions long, but habits form quickly. She is the last asleep and first awake, putting every candle and lamp out in her own private order. The others seem thankful for her dedication to these small duties when there was not something larger at hand – especially Tataru, who used to oversee most of the housekeeping aspects of the Rising Stones.

   Ysayle was just glad to have a home to put the lights out in, without having to tell someone to stand guard while she got her allotted five hours of sleep. Not that she sleeps much more now, but that was no one’s fault. Who could be blamed for the inside of her eyelids being littered with crystals whenever she closed them?

   It is nice to be alone, as well. It took more than an alliance for Ysayle to not feel like an intruder.

_(She had almost rejected the offer to join the Scions. It had seemed like a foolish kindness on their part, almost an act of pity._

_“If it helps,” Minfilia said, “Do not think of it as kindness. You of all people know what it means to have a duty to the realm and the Mother – I urge you to act upon it with our assistance.”_

_Ysayle caught what Minfilia had thrown, the thin line to walk between being given something and being told to earn it that she could rationalize._

_Between that and the promise of being close to her Warrior, she accepted.)_

   Tonight, she finds one of the candles gone from F’lhaminn’s bar. She takes her own to search the storage room beyond, now typically deserted as the clock swung closer to midnight. Sometimes Thancred would still be awake, flipping his knives carelessly, burying them in the table, but he had been sleeping earlier than most in recent days.

   It is not Thancred who she finds sitting at a small square table tucked into the back corner of the room, but Minfilia. She has the missing candle, burning to a stump in the mottled metal holder, and a plain cup of tea bathing her face in gently rising steam that caught the orange light.

   She is wearing a simple white nightgown, her blonde hair unbraided and instead bound in a silk blue ribbon behind her head. She seems still and thoughtful, her features clouded with sadness.

   Ysayle wants to shield her eyes, as though she has seen something deathly private. The Antecedent without her grand desk, her charming, smooth smile and confidence that held like a well-made shield.

   She would have felt intruded upon herself, had one of her followers come to see Saint Shiva’s vessel and found a tired, mortal woman, woken by nightmares.

   She decides it is worse to stare, that she must look like some strange specter standing silently with her knuckles white around her own candle.

   “Lady Minfilia?” She whispers, hopefully quiet enough to not surprise her.

   Minfilia does not look up. “Yes?” She says, easy and smooth.

   “Are you well? It is quite late…” Ysayle takes a seat on another crate sitting near the table, setting her candle down next to Minfilia’s.

   “I am quite fine.” Minfilia smiles, but her eyes do not, “I just needed something to help me relax. The days have been long.”

   Her tea is untouched.

   The rest, however, was true. Winter was rolling into Revenant’s Toll, days began and ended in the dark and the bitter winds of Coerthas rolled in from the north. It was winter when settlements like this struggled most – Ysayle was glad she had been such an asset. If she knew anything, it was surviving the cold with little to survive it with. Everyone was tired.  But Minfilia never shifted her rigid schedule unless something was truly wrong.

   She should not be the one to see this – but someone must.

   “Forgive my asking, I know it is not my place,” Ysayle ventures carefully, “But is that really all?”

   Minfilia does not seem offended, relieving Ysayle of some tension.

   “I suppose not.” She sighs.

   “If you’ve something you wish to say, it will not leave this room. You have my word.” Ysayle wonders how much her word means.

   Apparently, enough.

   “Does she ever speak to you anymore?” Minfilia asks. She does not need to clarify any further for Ysayle’s heart to twist in her chest.

   She recalls the dreams that keep her awake. She had grown used to nightmares, bloody scenes of ages past—she wonders if Minfilia sees anything like that, all forms of the echo manifest differently, after all—but all she had now were blinding thoughts. Hydaelyn sat embedded in her mind, an ever-present reminder of the gift she had squandered, and said nothing. Ysayle could not even be sure it was here, or a lingering regret that anyone could dream up.

   “I do not know.” She decides to be honest, “I have not heard her voice since Nidhogg fell, but…”

   “She is watching.” Minfilia says.

   Ysayle nods. The tea is no longer steaming quite so furiously.

   “…I was one with her once. Before you came from Ishgard.” Minfilia’s voice is soft as though trying not to break something, “I almost died in the escape from Ul’dah, and she lent me shelter as her voice and vessel. I spoke the sacred words of the Mother, and she imitated my will. Many would consider me blessed to have been so intimate with her.”

   It seemed blasphemous to compare sharing herself with a primal (she has been fighting to force herself to use the word, to never refer to her as a saint) to standing in the heart of the world. But how many experiences of watching your actions from behind your own eyes were there to compare at all?

   “Do you think yourself blessed?” Ysayle asks.

   “I hate that I do not.” Minfilia whispers to the table more than anyone. “I hardly even remember what it was like. All the time I dreamed of my fellow Scions, of going home to them. When she spoke to them through me she spoke the truth—that I understood my duty, that I was safe with her, that I believed in their ability to go on in my stead… But all I wanted to do was reach out, though I could not move my own arms. I was ungrateful.” She’s tilting like a cup knocked off center, water just barely scraping the rim, the shaking of her measured voice made Ysayle’s ears twitch.

   “…Then I, too, am ungrateful. She sent me visions to tell me my purpose. Visions of dragons and men in harmony, and of…” Ysayle still struggles to recall it, the images were so vivid, “Ratatoskr’s fate, through her own eyes.”

   Minfilia raises a brow, but seems happy enough to let Ysayle take the burden of explaining away their Mother’s strange choices.

   “I dreamed of them every night, in a little Ishgardian farming town. The chapel was next door. I used to think the pastor would read my very thoughts and throw me before the tribunal.” Ysayle speaks words she has never said aloud to anyone for fear of besmirching the very thing that allowed her to challenge Ishgard as it was.

   With only firelight to walk in, Ysayle and Minfilia both seemed to think the crystal’s light would not hear them.

   “But it had to be you.” Minfilia bites the sentence off as soon as it leaves her mouth, the silent implication of ‘but, why me?’ chasing up the back of her tongue.

   “Yes. But our duties are grave ones. Perhaps…” Ysayle says. ‘Painful’ is wedged next to grave in her tone, though she is too fearful to say it, the hairs standing up on her neck like someone is waiting for her next words, “...it is not wrong to treat them as such.”

   Minfilia finally meets her eyes, a glimmer of something lighting up the pupil-less blue. She has the cracking look of someone exhausted from trying to keep their wounds closed. Ysayle knows it from personal experience.

   There is another unspoken phrase, or concept, floating between them that neither are ready to say, a forbidden allowance of grief that needed time to loosen itself.

   They say no more, opting instead to let the words sit comfortably unsaid but understood, and to let the ticking of the grandfather clock carry them into the mingled colors of the morning.

   Perhaps they could both get some sleep later.


End file.
